Profile TradersTradingview Charts - A Guide to Backtesting, Screener, Alerts, and Crypto Pricing
Updated: Feb 21
After getting over a million active monthly users without any advertising budget in a month in 2016, Tradingview has not looked back. The investment of $37 million on Tradingview by the investment firm Insight Venture Partners in 2018 indicates that the TechStars Westerville headquartered Tradingview is on the right track. Its vital success started when it started to share its data visualization capabilities with Investopedia for free, which helped gain exposure worldwide, according to the Builtinchicago report.
Verify any technical trading concepts in Investopedia, and there will be many charts and representations given by Tradingview.
Majority of the Tradingview’s functionality is available for free users, which drives an insane amount of traffic. If a serious trader needs additional features such as multiple charts in one screen, or a customized timeframe (like 3 min or 7 min timeframe), they can opt for membership ranging from $15 to $60 (USD) per month.
This article aims to explain some of the crucial features of Tradingview and how it can solve many problems in traders’ life.
Table of Contents
CryptoCurrency Charting in Tradingview
What Makes Tradingview Special?
Disadvantages with Tradingview
Popular Topics
Tradingview Charts
Tradingview has customized URLs for different countries. For example, ‘Tradingview India’ can be accessed with in.tradingview.com and ‘Tradingview Japan’ can be accessed with jp.tradingview.com, and ‘Tradingview France’ can be accessed with fr.tradingview.com.
Tradingview charts look elegant and beautiful. I have used it for all my blog posts and books. Besides, it provides an option for all the users to create their customized indicators and store them on the servers so that anyone can use them; credit goes to their scripting language, ‘Pine Script.’
CryptoCurrency Charting in Tradingview
Tradingview gained a lot of users when it signed up with Nasdaq and Bitfinex - a cryptocurrency exchange. It also signed with other Crypto exchanges such as Bitstamp, Binance, Coinbase, etc., and also completely equipped with all the features before the crypto boom, and hence it became the No.1 charting tool among crypto traders.
Satoshi Nakamoto has developed the first cryptocurrency ‘bitcoin’ in 2009, and many such currencies were born in the last few years. At the time of writing this post, the US Dollar is getting weaker day by day against cryptocurrencies, and it indicates a radical shift in the investing world.
BTCUSD is the most popular traded pair among the Crypto vs. Currency pairs. At the time of writing this article, 1 Bitcoin is equal to 31,992 USD. Traders can also trade crypto vs. crypto pairs, and the most popular and liquid pair is ETHBTC (Ethereum Bitcoin).
Tradestation crypto has integrated with Tradingview a few months back, and it allowed the traders to trade, invest directly in cryptocurrencies without leaving the Tradingview platform. It is a great luxury and comfort to all the crypto traders.
Tradingview Paper Trading
Tradingview provides a paper trading facility (also called simulated trading) by giving a default fake balance of $100,000. It tracks all the paper trading orders and indicates how much Profit or Loss (PnL) with the trades.
The above image shows the USDINR chart.
The price is near the support trend line and is also displayed similar to the bullish harami pattern.
Assume you are a beginner or intermediate level trader and you want to paper trade the idea. Then, it is straightforward. Right-click on the chart and select the “Trade” option. You can select the ‘buy’ option (as you plan a long trade in the above example) to place the trade.
Then it pops-up a separate window at the bottom. If you plan to do only paper trading, then select the ‘Paper Trading’ option. Otherwise, if you have any broker account integrated with Tradingview, you can punch the order by logging into the respective account within the Tradingview panel.
The next step will display a new window on the right side to fill in the order details.
One can select either market, limit, or stop order. There is also an option to enter both the profit booking price level and the loss booking price levels. Enter all the details here, and after punching the order, all the order details will be shown at the bottom.
In this way, one can know the outcome of their trading idea using the paper-trading option in Tradingview.
Tradingview Screener
Tradingview also provides a screening facility to shortlist the stocks based on both fundamental and technical criteria.
Suppose say a trader uses 1-2 technical indicators in his trading system, and he wants to shortlist all the stocks which satisfy his criteria. It would have been a daunting task to search all the stocks manually one by one.
In such cases, the ‘Stock Screener’ option from Tradingview offers a helping hand. Even a free user can use this facility, as explained below.
Drag the bottom line upside to see the available options. Then select the ‘Stock Screener’ option to scan the stocks based on your criteria.
If you are a first time user and yet set up a system, select the ‘filters’ option from the right side window.
It populates a new window, as shown in the image-8. A trader can select either fundamental or technical criteria to scan the stocks.
For example, a trader has the below criteria to plan his ‘Long’ trades:
SMA 10 crosses above SMA 50 + RSI is above 60.
Then he can enter the criteria, as shown in image-9. Then it will list out all the stocks which satisfy the applied criteria as shown in the below image.
Tradingview Back Testing
Backtesting is a method to verify the performance of a trading system with historical data. It is important to verify the efficiency of a trading system or strategy before started making trades with real money.
There are many tools and software are available for backtesting. A few examples are Amibroker, Python, etc. Tradingview provides a simple yet effective way to backtest a trading strategy, and the most attractive feature is it is available even for free users!
Tradingview provides two types of backtesting:
Manual Method via Bar Replay
Automated Method via Pine Editor and Strategy Tester
Manual Method via Bar Replay
‘Bar Replay’ is a simple feature that allows a trader to move backward and verify the price movements candle by candle to test the efficiency of a trading strategy.
Suppose if you have a trading strategy in mind and applied all the necessary indicators on the charts. Now you want to verify the strategy for the last year. Then select the ‘Bar Replay’ option as shown in the image-11.
Images 12.1 and 12.2 show how to perform the backtesting manually.
One can take back the ‘red line’ to the desired starting point (1-year back in the above example) as shown in image 12.1.
Later a trader can verify the price movements candle by candle or with the continuous play option as shown in image 12.2.
Disadvantages in Bar Replay method:
Backtesting is not automated. One has to verify the charts manually.
Fundamental Analysis is not covered in this method.
One cannot deploy indicator based backtesting.
Automated Method via Pine Editor and Strategy Tester
It is the most effective way to backtest any strategy in a few minutes. However, it demands little coding efforts in ‘Pine Editor’ and verifies the results on the ‘Strategy Tester’ tab.
Pine script is the backbone behind these options, which is a simple programming language developed by Tradingview. It is lightweight, similar to Python coding, and one can achieve results with fewer code lines than other programming languages.
Advantages of Pine Editor – 1) No need to buy or convert the historical data as it comes readymade in Tradingview for all the users. 2) It is to learn as compared to any programming language. 3) Cloud Storage allows the traders to store their customized indicators.
‘Pine Editor’ is the place where a trader has to write the code. Select the Pine Editor option from the bottom line, as shown in the below image.
Below is the simple code to extract and plot 10 SMA of Infosys.
The above image shows the pine code details for the MA crossover strategy.
Long Trade - When 10 SMA crosses 50 SMA from down and RSI is greater than 60
Short Trade - When 10 SMA crosses 50 SMA from upside and RSI is less than 40
The above code is self-explanatory. If you are interested to learn more about Pine coding, then please refer to the below video.
Tradingview Alerts
Practically it isn't comfortable to sit in front of a computer screen waiting for our trade setups to occur. In this regard, alerts play a crucial role in notifying a trader that his trade setups occur.
Select the chart of the stock in which you want to set the alert. For example, a trader wants to add an alert in USDCAD when the below condition is satisfied:
"10 SMA crosses over 50 SMA from the downside."
Both images 16.1 and 16.2 explains the procedure to set an alert. After opting to add an alert option, you can amend the alert conditions as required (based on your trading system), select appropriate alert mode (email, message, or pop-up in the system), and choose the create option. It will notify through the selected method of alert when the conditions are satisfied.
The only drawback is it doesn’t provide many alerts facilities for free users. One has to register for the ‘pro’ version to get more alerts facilities.
Tradingview App
Tradingview provides both mobile app and desktop apps.
At the time of writing this article, the desktop app is still in beta version. However, it looks great as the Desktop app version of Tradingview is faster as compared browser version.
Tradingview Blog
Tradingview is famous for cutting-edge technology features. However, a trader might find difficulty whenever a new feature is introduced. Hence, Tradingview provides a detailed article about all the new features in its blog.
The blog also contains many self-help guides on Pine coding, Integration with brokers, customizing charts, adding new hotkeys, Data availability, etc.
To know all the features of Tradingview, visit their blog here.
What Makes Tradingview Special?
Tradingview provides some of the fascinating features among all the chart providers. Besides, many of these cutting edge features are also available for free users. We have listed some of the attractive features below:
Compare
If a trader is looking to invest in a stock for long term investment, then it is better to compare its behavior with the market index.
Market leaders are the stocks that bleed less when the market is in a downtrend and shows more up move when the market is in sideways or uptrend.
The above image compares ‘Infosys’ movements along with Nifty (Indian Index). A closer look reveals that Infy performed better as compared to nifty.
When the Nifty is in an uptrend, Infosys is also in an uptrend, but it displayed more magnitude on the upside. Similarly, when the Nifty is in a downtrend, Infosys showed less correction.
Candlestick Pattern Identification
Many traders rely on just a few powerful candlestick patterns like Bullish Engulfing, hammer, Morning star, etc., for their trading. Hence, getting a list of stocks with these powerful candlestick patterns saves a lot of time and provides an edge in trading.
